"I am in both," I answered, "so tell me what I must do."
"What I say now is what Suliman bade me say. I—I could not have thought of it myself. I was the one appointed to free you after fifteen years of slavery. If besides that I give you a sword of gold to fight your battle, you must promise never to use it in revenge."
"I don't know what you mean."
"How can I tell you when I can feel it only in my heart, not in my head? But it is a great thing. Unless you live by it, your soul will die."
"You've set me free, and if you also give me a sword of gold, I'll never use it in revenge. I'll take no blood price for the wrongs done to those I love and to me. I'll do only what my captain bade me with his last breath."
"Do you swear it by the bread and salt we've eaten together?"
"By that, and by my love for you, and by my soul."
"It's by my love for you I ask it, which is all I know."
Suddenly she was sobbing in my arms. Over the eastern hills the moon rose shield-shaped and red, and the jackals raised their voices in eerie cries. But there was only one sign that I believed, prophetic of my future days, and it was of love that would guide and guard me still. It was the sign of her lips on mine, her tears upon my face.
CHAPTER 17
The Challenge
We came from the raw desert into a steppe rimmed by purple hills. Thorn and acacia thickets became a commonplace; some of the watercourses had little rivulets among the rocks in the cool shade of the heavy growth of the wadis; water holes were no longer hard to find. No few sheep, camel, and cattle drovers followed the grass, sometimes in bands no larger than a patriarchal family. But the fodder was not as good as it used to be, they told us, and the steppe not as broad. In their grandsire's time they could range far east and north where now stretched burning sands.
Although we had entered what was called the Country of the Blacks, the people we met were not Negroes of any kind we knew, being slightly built men of brown or reddish skins, broad between the eyes, with straight high noses, pointed chins, and sparse beards. The children's hair showed wavy; the men wore it fantastically dressed. Invariably there was one or more in the band who could speak Arabic. Only a few had heard of the Tuareg, star-far on the western Sahara; almost all knew of the horse-raising Beni Kabir. The most immediately exciting feature of the country was its numberless and varied kinds of animals. As soon as we got into partially wooded lands, we could hardly believe our eyes.
Crossing the Nile on ancient ferries, we went forth into the bush without great trepidation. Most of the robber bands were small and poorly armed, and far weaker parties than ours went about their business, largely unmolested, savages as well as thieves being restrained by fear of battle, fear of reprisal, and fear of breaking that oldest and greatest of all laws, moral and economic, to live and let live.
The plain was largely steppe, broken by thorn and acacia thickets and occasional clumps of wadi thorn and dwarf mimosa trees; tall trees I did not know and dull-green thorny jungle filled some of the watercourses. Many kinds of antelope and gazelle thrived on the coarse herbage. We must keep our guns loaded for rhinos, watch for snakes, approach no big water hole without looking out for crocodiles; burn night fires against lions and leopards, and be ever ready to turn out for elephants.
We saw several cows and calves and young bulls, none with ivory worth the taking, on our first day east of the Nile. On the second day we had distant views of several lone bulls, and toward evening came close to colliding with a herd of thirty or more elephants, led by a monster whose height I might have guessed in feet, but having horses on the brain—as all men do who live by them for a few years—I took pleasure in reckoning him at thirty-six hands. That was twice as tall as the largest Clydesdale draft horse. I could not believe his weight to be less than six tons.
Yet he, his cows, some young bulls, and several calves were making through the thorn forest like so many clouds of smoke. By staying downwind, we did not wake their rage, and they let us pass.
"Collecting ivory, if only as a screen for robbing graves, will be excellent sport," Zoan, the intrepid Tuareg chief, remarked with a boyish smile showing through his veil.
Three days from the Nile we came to the Atbara. Only trickles and pools remained of the late summer floods that had brought down whole trees from the Ethiopian forests, the flotsam of villages, dead herds of cattle, and drowned elephants. We crossed the deep-scoured bed, and in half a day's journey came to the village of Takuba, Isabel's kinsman, a Tuareg of the Kel Allaghan, who are Sons of the Spear.
He dwelt in a house of baked mud with a tiled roof; his kraals spread far and wide, bursting with cattle and sheep, goats and horses, and the thatched-roofed huts of his serfs dotted the plain. He was away on his pastures when we arrived, but when the shadows longed, we saw him coming on an excellent sable-brown mare-one bred by the Beni Kabir unless I missed my guess—his face hidden behind the black veil of a Tuareg nobleman. His bearded scribe was riding beside and a little behind him, and his Negro sais brought up the rear.
At sight of his black-veiled kinsmen he uttered a great cry of "Sano!" and spurred his horse. But before he could greet them, his eyes fell on Isabel, and then he could hardly keep his seat. The Tuareg were haughty and stone-still with strangers, debonair in times of stress, and I had not lately seen a man so overcome. His hands dropped to his sides, and he blurted out a question in the Tamashek tongue. It contained the name "Izubahil."
She made some warm answer and, hurrying to him, put her hand in his. It was as though she wished to show him that she was Izubahil in the flesh. Deeply moved, he dismounted and kissed her between the eyes, as might an Arab elder. During the grave talk that followed, he glanced at me with friendly interest. Then while his slaves passed tobacco and barley beer to the company, he led Isabel and me into a dim room with whitewashed walls.
Their conversation was in Tamashek, Isabel interpreting as tersely as possible. Granting that my barraka was of great power, yet he believed the demons guarding the tomb to be invincible, and he would counsel me not to meddle with them in any maimer; but plainly it was my kismet to do so, and no man can fight his kismet. A hunting party could well choose as its base camp the bank of the Atbara close by the buried and almost-forgotten stairway. But there was one obstacle that must first be overcome. This Isabel repeated to me in direct translation.
"The king of the Beni Amer won't let foreigners hunt ivory in his dominions without his consent," Takuba said. "If I ask him to come here—his kraals are a day's journey southward—he will do so, and decide the matter, whether yes or no. You have a fearful face and an ungainly form. This will go against you, but Izubahil wouldn't wife with you if you weren't strong and brave, which Simba—the name means Lion in the tongue of his mother, a slave trader's daughter from Mombasa—demands of every man receiving his favor. Also, he shall hear that you were born free and equal to any man in your tribe, according to the Writing, which Izubahil has told me, and which will please the king."
A runner to Simba's kraals sped on his way. For three days we travelers rested and were richly fed. Then midday brought a swiftly moving dust cloud that soon disclosed a band of fifty riders on good but not pure-bred Arabian horses. Less than half had guns, the rest carried spears either of iron or, longer and fully as formidable, bamboo sharp as bayonets and hardened in fire. They wore woolen robes, and their hair grew in a fuzzy mop, projecting above the forehead and standing brushlike all over the head to the nape of the neck. They were lightly built men, not as tail as the Tuareg, with glowing reddish-brown skins. Patently they were horsemen and nomads since time out of mind.